To get things started I used a VM on the same network as the Rubrik nodes were on. I installed Bonjour from Apple and made sure Google Chrome was installed for HTML5. Once that was done I wrote down all of the interface address from the back of each of the nodes and tried to ping one of them to make sure I could reach them. You simply use the “interface-address.local” to reach them.

Next up I opened up Chrome and entered one of the .local addresses. You can connect to any of the nodes in the cluster to setup or manage them. You are shown that it will be creating the “admin” user and asked to enter an email address and the password.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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You may be thinking that it has only been a few short months since we first heard from Rubrik as they exited stealth mode, well you would be right. The team at Rubrik must not like to sleep much, because they have been working hard on several small code releases and are proud to announce they have reached version 2.0. This is a big deal for such a young company in a short amount of time.

There are a number of new impressive features in the new version along with an additional to the hardware appliance line. I’ll cover these in more detail below.

Version 2.0 Features

Replication – Rubrik will now have replication as part of their feature set. This replication is from site to site or box to box, however you want to say it. Whether I have a single brik or multiples in each site, with replication I can now replicate my protected VMs from site A to site B, as well as still keeping an archive copy in the cloud. This is a highly sought after feature and would be required by most organizations if they plan on adopting and have multiple sites. The replication enablement ties in smoothly with Rubrik’s SLA policies in that you turn on replication at the SLA level and any VMs protected by the policy will be replicated. This is flexible enough that you can replicate from as low as a single VM to every VM and all points in between. And lastly on replication the task is able to remain WAN efficient by taking advantage of global deduplication to reduce the amount of data needing to be sent between sites.

Larger Brik – With the release of 2.0, Rubrik is also announcing the availability of the R348 brik. This model appliance contains nodes that have 8TB drives, versus 4TB drives included in the original appliances. The 348 will allow customers to start with a larger capacity option or with the ability to mix and match briks you can add the type of node that will meet your backup capacity requirements.

AD Integration – The original release only had the ability to use local accounts for authentication. Version 2.0 brings the ability to use Active Directory accounts to authenticate to the Rubrik management interface for managing the appliance and backups. This is a normal progression for young products and is a must for larger organizations, good to se Rubrik checking off the required boxes in a timely fashion.

Swift Support – Since it’s release Rubrik has had the ability to archive backup data to Amazon, with 2.0 you will have the ability to archive to Swift the object based storage from the Openstack project. This will allow customers to archive to local or remote managed Swift storage, or to cloud hosted Swift storage. This is just another destination option for storing your long term archive backups for customers to take advantage of.

Application Aware Backups – This is something that will make a lot of admins and application owners happy. With 2.0 the ability to leverage VSS provider to protect MS SQL, MS Exchange, Active Directory and SharePoint workloads will be welcomed. This is also a major requirement for most organizations when considering a backup solution.

Detailed Reporting – With the new version, Rubrik is improving their ability to inform the admin on what is happening with the solution. The reporting will improve technical detail, active job information and failure reporting along with other data. This is a natural growth path as feedback is taken from customers and testers of the product.

Capacity Planning – There was already reporting on how much space was being consumed via backup data in the first release, with 2.0 Rubrik is improving this data. You will also get insight into daily growth rates and get an estimate on how much capacity is left in the number of days till your current nodes would be filled up. This will allow you to adjust your archive to cloud config or know when to purchase additional capacity.

Compliance Reports – This is a simple way to see which VMs are in or out of compliance with their backup policies. In short do I have VMs that failed or missed a backup, which puts them out of compliance.

Auto Protect – In the first release you would assign VMs to a protection policy and they would be backed up. With this new feature, admins have the ability to apply a policy at the vCenter, Data Center, Folder, Host and cluster levels. This will allow protect any existing or new VMs at that level.

The 2.0 release is a pretty large update for Rubrik and has some great new features. I look forward to the upgrade and getting some hands on time with the update soon.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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A recent entrant into the data protection market is Rubrik. You can find out more about Rubrik and their background here. You can also learn a little more about Rubrik from a post that Eric Shanks just published following his visit to Virtulization Field Day. I was recently presented with the opportunity to install one of their brik’s into a lab environment to get some hands-on time with the product. I already have a list of follow-on blog posts planned. I’m not going to dive into how it all works in this post, I’ll save that for one of the other ones. Once the brik was racked and cabled it really did only take about 15 minutes for the total install process to complete, and I immediately configured my first VM for protection. Kudos to Rubrik on delivering on that fast install process.

The first picture is of the front of the Rubrik brik with the bezel on. You may have noticed this is not the nice white looking one currently being shown on their website. I was told that this is the original face place and would be replaced when others become available. The chassis that Rubrik is using, is a Supermicro that contains 4 server nodes. On the front mounting flange on each side there is a pair of power buttons and lights that match to each of the nodes.

The next picture is the front of the brik with the bezel removed. This exposes 3 disk drives per node. The drives for each node are stacked vertically. The model that I was testing is the one currently available and each of these drives is a 4TB drive.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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I was able to get an advance peak at Nakivo’s v3.9 of their backup solution. I have not had the chance to work with the product yet but the thing that excited me was the support to Multi-Tenancy. I know that this is not something that most customer IT shops have a need for but as cloud is becoming more widely used this type of offering is sure to be appreciated by customers.

The simple idea here is that as a customer of a hosted service or cloud offering I would be able to manage my own backups as expected. Also be able to control restores and any other features that are related to the product. On the hosting provider the product should be flexible enough to handle a large number of customers and the licensing model should be flexible.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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I don’t work with backup products on a daily basis anymore, so I was interested when offered the chance to test and review the PHD virtual backup product. This post is not intended to convince or sell you anything, but to offer you a clear view of what features the product offers and an idea of how you might work with them.

After working with the product for a few weeks, I’ve listed some of the features that were important to me. Overall I thought the product was very easy to setup and work with on a daily basis.

Built in replication

Live VM recovery

Easy setup and job scheduling

Installation:

The installation of PHD Virtual Backup was a pretty simple process. The Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) is deployed from an OVF file. In my testing I only deployed a single VBA, but in larger environments multiple VBA’s could be deployed to accommodate backup requirements. The main thing to consider is the VBA must be able to access the storage for the VM it will be backing up. Examples below.

Local Storage – If you are backing up a VM that is on a datastore that is on local host storage you must deploy a VBA on that host.

Shared Storage – A common example would be you have multiple clusters, each host within each cluster can see all the same datastores. In this scenario you could deploy a single VBA to each cluster because it would be able to access all of the shared storage within the cluster its deployed to.

The VBA can store your backed up virtual machines on different types of storage. You can use attached virtual disks (VMDK) on the VBA that can reside on any type of shared or local storage, this is the recommended method. Network storage can also be leveraged, the VBA can write backups to CIFS or NFS based storage.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design